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Overall Project

»Understanding Trust. Foundations, Forms and Limits of Trust«

Trust is a
basic phenomenon of human life that has stood in the center of attention in a
number of disciplines for some time. On the one hand, human life in its
individual and its institutionalized forms is impossible without trust (humans
need trust), while, on the other hand, crises of trust are increasingly spoken
of in many areas of private and public life (trust is lost).
Many individual problems, however, remain unclear and
controversial, The fact that solutions for these problems are still sought either
mainly or only within individual disciplines
stands factually and methodically most unsatisfactory of all.

Aims and Methodology

The researchers participatingin the project „Understanding
Trust. Foundations, Forms and Limits of Trust“, share the conviction that this
complex phenomenon is, in an exemplary manner, a trans-disciplinary problem. In
fact, solutions to its problems can only be worked out through focused collaboration
between different disciplines and methodological approaches. Questions of
neurology or behavioral research are not the same as those in history,
psychology or theology. These disciplines, however, all work on the problem of
trust. This obviously suggests a close cooperation between these disciplines
which benefits the project both substantially and methodically. So far, such
cooperation has been achieved only occasionally and bilaterally, but without
programmatic, multidisciplinary, and methodical controls in place. For the
project it is methodologically crucial that the disciplines involved shall not
only benefit from each other in their mutual reception of results, but in the
ordered and cooperative pursuit of
knowledge right from the beginning. We expect that, in this way, a coherent
understanding of trust can be developed that accounts both for trust’s biological
origins and natural foundations and for its social instantiations, institutions,
and problems (trust,
distrust, mistrust). We do this, in order to determine more precisely the
limits of reasonable trust, mistrust and distrust.

This
project is funded by the Swiss National
Science Foundation and the Mercator
Foundation Switzerland.